. Seven great American poets. gust2U, 1809. In referring to his birthday, he said, Inthe last week of August used to fall (CommencementDay at Cambridge. I remember that weelz aacU, forsomething happened to me once at that time, namely,I was born. This old gaml)rel-roofed house stoodbetween the sites now occupied by the Hemenway(iymnasium and the Law of Harvard was a spacious mansion, set well back from the road,with a generous expanse of common beside it, and tallAmerican elms that overshadowed it. The poet says, The old house was (icncriil^Wards lieacl(|uarters attheljr
. Seven great American poets. gust2U, 1809. In referring to his birthday, he said, Inthe last week of August used to fall (CommencementDay at Cambridge. I remember that weelz aacU, forsomething happened to me once at that time, namely,I was born. This old gaml)rel-roofed house stoodbetween the sites now occupied by the Hemenway(iymnasium and the Law of Harvard was a spacious mansion, set well back from the road,with a generous expanse of common beside it, and tallAmerican elms that overshadowed it. The poet says, The old house was (icncriil^Wards lieacl(|uarters attheljreak-iii^- out of tlie Ucvohition ; the plan for forfifviui;- Bunkers Hillwas laid, as conimonly believed, in the southeast lower room, thefliHir of whirli waseoverpd with dents, made, it was allecrpd, l)vthebutts of the soldiers nuiskcts. In the hoiis(^ too, (icMieral A\ar-ren prolialdy jiasscd the night before the Bunker Hill liattle, andover its threshold must the stately figure of Wasliington haveoften cast its shado> 246 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMEU When, years after, the old homestead became theproperty of Harvard Iuiversity, HohuBS wrote mostregretfully of its destruction: The Old (;aiiibivl-r()(ifeil House exists no longer. . .We may (lie out of many houses, but the house can die but once;and so real is the life of a house to one \vho has dwelt in it,more especially the life ot a house Mhich held him in dreamyinfancy, in restless lioyliood, in jjassioualc; youth, —so real, 1say, is its life, that it seems as if something like a soul of itmust outlast its perishing frame. To his friend, I^owell, he wrote : Our old house is n-one. I went all over it, — into everychamber and eloset, and found a ghost in each and all of them,to which I said good-by. I have not seen the level groundwhere it stood. Be very thankful that you still keep your birth-place. This earth has a homeless look to me since mine hasdisappeared from its face. The Reverend Abiel Holmes, the father of the
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